The formal reporting for this study started in 1987 when several of the changes described here were getting under way. But my work as a Times-watcher goes back three decades. As a wire-service reporter in Washington during the mid-1950s, I first competed against the Times. During the 1960s, when I was an editor at Newsweek, the competition between daily paper and weekly newsmagazine was less direct, and so my work at Newsweek didn’t prevent me from receiving regular assignments from the Times Magazine. These Magazine assignments stopped in 1970, when I became a contributing editor at New York magazine, writing about the press, including the Times. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a right-wing bumper sticker challenged critics of the Vietnam war: “U.S.A.—Love It or Leave It.” The slogan comes to mind whenever I read the Times, as subscriber and as critic; it remains a paper too smug to love, yet too important to leave.
Most of the materials in this book come from my own reporting over the past five years, including some two dozen tape-recorded interviews with Times people, present and past, as well as three times that number of non-taped interviews with other Timesmen and -women. I acknowledge their cooperation and interest. In addition, the Times allowed me access to its archives, or at least those portions open to outsiders. In general, the rule was that “inactive” files—that is, materials about Times executives who were retired or dead—could be studied. Nevertheless, one or two exceptions involving still “active” executives were made. I thank the staff of the archives, and particularly its former director, Dr. John Rothman, for allowing me fair use of selected materials.
Several memoirs and studies of the Times have been published over the years, and I’ve tried to digest them all, even when they fell outside the time frame of this book. For example, I read Ruth Adler’s A Day in the Life of The New York Times (Lippincott/NY Times, 1971) and used it as a model for reconstructing my own twenty-four-hour day in the life of the modern Times. (Adler was an Ochs family member, and her project had official status, unlike my “Day.”) Several analyses of the American press that treated the Times in passing were helpful, particularly Deborah Lipstadt’s study of how the press covered Hitler’s persecution of European Jews. Some excellent studies of New York City and its media also exist. Richard Kluger’s The Paper: The Life and Death of the New York Herald Tribune was especially helpful. Over the years, too, I’ve done content analyses and criticism of the Times for New York magazine, for various journalism reviews, and for a series of my own studies published by the MIT Press.
I’ve drawn on these interviews, reporting, analyses, and books. I would also like to acknowledge the research and administrative assistance of Mariah Bear, Eileen Clarke, Dale Fuchs, Gregg Geller, Kate O’Hara, Rebecca Mead, Lori Robinson, Whitney Scott, Stacy Shatkin, Robert Silverman, Christal Smith, Martha Bula Torres, David White, and Matthew Fenton. I am also grateful for the advice and support of Lois and Tom Wallace. I wish to thank Adelina Diamond, my best friend, and Edward Kosner, the best editor I know (and the editor and president of New York at the time I worked on this project), for their support and counsel. Finally, I owe a special debt to Diane Reverand and Emily Bestler, my infinitely patient and skilled editors at Villard Books.
All the opinions and conclusions here are my own, and I bear sole responsibility for them.
Edwin Diamond
New York, September 1993